A change of plans seemed in order for the long weekend. I hope semperloquitur doesn’t see this criticism of John Kiriakou as stepping on his Sunday movie feature.
I started watching Kiriakou occasionally when he was the host of Ted Rall on Deprogrammed, as well as a long interview with Tucker Carlson, and previous comments about the US torture program. Rall provided an update two months ago on A Funny Thing Happened to John Kiriakou:
John Kiriakou was not down and out. But he was struggling.
Not only was John broke, he was drowning in legal fees owed to the lawyers who defended him when the federal government was after him…. He ended food stamps. Whether the hitch was his age (61) or the US government’s obstruction, who can say?…
John Kiriakou was the whistleblower who exposed the CIA’s Bush-era torture program, notorious for waterboarding and other atrocities. Instead of getting the medal and ticker-tape display he deserved, the government sent him to state prison for almost two years—for telling a bunch of horrible truths. They wrecked his marriage, stole his pension and framed him he as a bad person.
Now you are a meme. Literally hundreds of memes. If you’ve been online in the past month, you’ve probably seen iterations of CIA John, as twentysomethings call him, over and over again…
“I didn’t know what to do to change things” after his release. John told me. “So I just decided to start saying yes to podcasts. If you’re a 17-year-old kid and you have a podcast that your high school friends play, the answer is yes. Then two years ago, I started getting invitations to go to big podcasts.” John spent his days appearing on one podcast after another. He was busy. But he could not make a living.
Then another kid made a TikTok.
“My nephew called me and said, ‘Uncle John, you are talking bad about the Internet.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Here are your funny shorts.’ I said, ‘From where?’ He said, “I don’t know…” I went on TikTok, and realized from what I was wearing that it was from the ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast. Some kid just took over that conversation, cut my stories into shorts, changed my voice from my normal ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ voice to a deep ogre voice, and laser beams came out of my eyes. “
“It was crazy until I got to the point where I was about to watch a billion people. It’s amazing to me. The next day, I was filming a movie with a German production company 25.th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. We were in the Pentagon for three hours, and 10 people stopped me to take selfies…’”
John’s life has changed…forever? Who knows?…
What is certain is that, thanks to that TikTok episode and the podcast episode that inspired it, John’s penchant for telling the truth has lifted him from relative obscurity – unlike Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, he wasn’t a household name – to worldwide fame.
One of the greatest luxuries in life is being able to be who you were meant to be. The appalling miscarriage of justice as Kiriakou is the only person prosecuted in the US torture system seems to have done that to him. But very few have the creativity, tenacity, and passion to change their lives the way he does. In particular, you convey a deep desire to be loved without seeming pretentious or needy. It is possible, at least to my ear, to place his voice in the category of heroes, which elevates strength and what the Japanese call yaruki, translated by our colleagues at Sumitomo Bank as “spirit of fury” or perhaps more politely, “you can do it”.
Kiriakou said that North by Northwest is his favorite spy movie (while admitting that most wouldn’t put it in that category) and that he has seen it at least 100 times.
Below Kiriakou discusses some trading points. He has more talks on similar topics on YouTube.
Enjoy!
